When Rosa Parks spoke at Robert Williams' funeral in
Monroe, North Carolina on October 22, 1996, she said those who
marched with Martin Luther King Jr. in Alabama admired Williams "for
his courage and his commitment to freedom. The work that he did
should go down in history and never be forgotten." But the words of
this champion of nonviolent protest may surprise those who know
Williams believed in "armed self-reliance" and was "a very good
friend" of Malcolm X.

Born in the small town of Monroe in 1925, Robert
Williams was raised on stories from his former-slave grandmother
Ellen and tales of his grandfather Sikes, who stumped North Carolina
for the Republican Party during Reconstruction and published a
newspaper called The People's
Voice . Before she died, Ellen Williams
gave young Robert the rifle which his grandfather had wielded against
white terrorists at the turn of the century.

Williams came face-to-face with racism early on.
As an 11-year-old in 1936, he saw a white policeman, Jesse Helms, Sr.
beat an African-American woman to the ground. Williams watched in
terror as North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms' father hit the woman
and "dragged her off to the nearby jailhouse, her dress up over her
head, the same way that a cave man would club and drag his sexual
prey."

During World War II, Williams went North to find
work. He fought in the Detroit Riot of 1943, when white mobs killed
dozens of black citizens. Drafted in 1944, Robert served for 18
months, fighting for freedom in a segregated Army. He returned to
Monroe and in 1947 married Mabel Robinson, who shared his commitment
to social justice and African-American freedom.

As president of the Monroe NAACP in the late
1950s, Williams watched as members of his community were denied basic
rights, tormented by the KKK, and ignored in the courts. Seeing no
other recourse, he began to advocate "armed self-reliance" in the
face of the white terrorism. Members of his NAACP chapter protected
their homes against the Klan with rifles and sandbag
fortifications.

Williams' advocacy of violence made him into an
example at the 1959 NAACP convention. He had been removed from his
post as Monroe NAACP president, and he listened at the convention as
40 speakers denounced him. He responded that he had called for
self-defense, not acts of war: "We as men should stand up as men and
protect our women and children. I am a man, and I will walk upright
as a man should. I WILL NOT CRAWL." His logic compelled Martin Luther
King, Jr. to acknowledge that, "when the Negro uses force in
self-defense he does not forfeit support -- he may even win it, by
the courage and self-respect it reflects."

As the debate over violence and nonviolence raged
in 1961, King dispatched "Freedom Riders" to organize a nonviolent
campaign in Williams' hometown. But white mobs caused the nonviolent
crusade in Monroe to disintegrate into violence, and Robert and Mabel
were forced to flee to Cuba to escape the hundreds of FBI agents who
combed the countryside for them. One of the agents reported his
frustrations to J. Edgar Hoover: "Subject has become something of a
'John Brown' to Negroes around Monroe, and they will do anything for
him."

In Cuba, Williams wrote Negroes With Guns , which was
a pivotal influence on Huey P. Newton, founder of the Black Panther
Party. He and Mabel aired a radio show and continued to publish their
newspaper, The
Crusader , for thousands of
subscribers. In 1965, Williams moved his family to the People's
Republic of China, where they lived among the upper circles of the
Chinese government during the Cultural Revolution.

When President Richard Nixon's administration
launched secret contacts with China in the late 1960s, Williams
bartered his knowledge of the Chinese government for safe passage
home and a Ford Foundation grant to work at the Center for Chinese
Studies at the University of Michigan. He played a significant role
in the historic opening of diplomatic relations between the United
States and China.

In his battle against Hodgkin's disease, Williams
was as brave as he had ever been. His memoirs, While God Lay Sleeping: The Autobiography of Robert F.
Williams , tell the compelling story of
a man who risked his life for democracy and a humanitarian vision
that was rooted in the finest traditions of African-American
striving. Above the desk where he wrote hangs the ancient rifle that
was a gift from his grandmother.

"1957: Swimming Pool Showdown" by Robert F. Williams
appeared in Southern Exposure, summer 1980 in an issue
on the Ku Klux Klan.

Timothy B. Tyson is a North Carolina native and an assistant
professor of Afro-American Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison.
His forthcoming book, Radio free Dixie: Robert F. Williams
and the Roots of Black Power, will be published by University
of North Carolina Press.